AMID THE FLASHING STROBE LIGHTS OF BLOOM-ers Nightclub, in Manila's red-light district, a small girl sits perched on a bar stool, her chin on one forearm, gazing up at the young women in string bikinis who dance to the thump of loud rock music. The girl, who is 10 years old and whose name is Winda, swings gently on her bar stool in time to the music, a packet of red roses dangling forgotten from her hand.

On the raucous street outside, her mother, Sepa Rascano, frets, and with good reason, about Winda and her 11-year-old sister, Muyeth, who is somewhere down the road with her own packet of roses. ''I sometimes have to follow Winda around because if I don't she starts playing, or she sits and watches the dancers,'' the mother says. ''Sometimes I pretend that I'm angry. 'What are you doing here? You have to work.' When Winda sees that I am angry, she gets up and sells the roses.''

At home, the girls' father, Rudy, is restless, too, Sepa says. It is past midnight, and with his wife and older daughters at work, he complains that his three smaller children keep him awake. Home for the Rascano family, following a fire that razed the slum where they lived, is a cell in the Manila City Jail, where Rudy is serving a life sentence for a murder to which he admits. ''The situation of my children is just like working students,'' he says. ''Everything I have, everything I eat, I get from them.''

DESPITE THEIR HARDSHIPS, THE ENERGY AND JOY of the Rascano girls is striking as they skip rope in the prison yard, walk hand in hand at work with their roses, or smile up at a foreign customer, saying, ''Sir, you buy one flower, only 20 pesos, you give your girlfriend.'' Despite the toughness they have had to learn, they share their pesos with beggars on the street and save portions of their food to take home to their father.

Winda and Muyeth are two of the millions of working children in the Philippines, some of whom labor in garment factories or on sugar plantations; dive for fish in the coral reefs or scavenge through garbage dumps for bits of plastic; carry rifles in the Communist insurgency or with anti-Communist vigilante groups or, in the case of the most degraded, sell themselves as child prostitutes -some 9,000 in Manila alone.

Officials concede that in this nation where 70 percent of the people live below the poverty line, the labor of children, as in many other poor countries, is often essential for the survival of their families.

The story of Winda and Muyeth is the story of the inescapable hardships that face millions of families around the world. But like each of those other stories, theirs is a particular one, a human struggle in which the hard realities have their own individual character. Like the others, their situation seems more complicated and more desperate - and harder to condemn or help improve - the more closely it is examined.

IT IS PAST NOON IN THE CITY JAIL AND THE GIRLS ARE ASLEEP on the floor of their father's tiny cell, their month-old sister, Jennifer, curled up in a tiny hammock above them. They arrived home at 8 this morning after sleeping on the sidewalk because they had not earned enough with their flowers to pay the guards to unlock the cell block at night.

Sepa has already left for the bus station to buy three dozen roses from the mountain city of Baguio, to be sold in the bars tonight. Rudy is in the courtyard, near a small pond filled with refuse, playing shuttlecock with his friends, who are mostly shirtless in the hot afternoon. Like many of his friends, Rudy bears the tattoos that mark him as a member of a criminal gang. And like many of them, his stomach is patterned with the scars of razor cuts, self-inflicted during an ecstasy of drug taking.

More than 2,000 inmates are crowded into the Manila City Jail, a facility built to house 700, and some of them, unable to pay, as Rudy did, for their own private cells, sleep in corridors. Like Rudy, a number have been joined by their families, who share a cot or a piece of cardboard on the floor, and the jail has the pulse and clamor of an overcrowded village.

As Winda and Muyeth sleep, the cell block is filled with the clashing rhythms of several radios, the shouting of men and children, the crowing of fighting cocks and the constant hammering of a cabinetmaker. At a table in the corridor nearby, a group of men play mah-jongg, clacking the plastic tiles. There is a basketball game on television. Children toss small coins against a wall.

Now Sepa is back with her roses, spreading them on the floor beside her sleeping daughters, where she will carefully remove their thorns, snip off the wilted petals and reinforce the stems with wire.

But first she kicks at the legs of her girls to wake them, saying, ''Get up, get up, it's 1:30. How hard you are to wake up.''

''Are we going to school?'' murmurs Muyeth before going back to sleep. ''What do you mean, school?'' says her mother. ''It's 1:30.'' The girls are enrolled in afternoon sessions at separate schools, though they attend only once or twice a week before heading to work in the evenings. The classes are crowded with 30 to 40 students each, and Winda's school was so dilapidated that at one point classes were held in tents beside the Pasig River until a new building could be readied.

Muyeth, the more industrious of the two, borrows the books of her fourth-grade schoolmates to hurry through her homework before her lessons start. But her teachers, who know little about her life, are rarely sympathetic.

''Sometimes the teachers get mad at me. They pinch my ear or give me a slap for not doing my homework,'' she said one day. ''Today the English teacher was asking why I am absent so much. She came in and said, 'Oh, Muyeth, you're still alive. Where have you been?' I didn't answer anything.''

Winda's prospects are bleaker. A winsome and playful girl who keeps a large pink plastic comb and a tube of hair gel in her pockets, it took her two years to complete first grade. Now she is repeating second grade, towering over her younger classmates and teased by them for being ''bobo,'' a dummy.

One day, while the teacher was writing on the blackboard, Winda pulled from her school bag a Polaroid photograph of herself selling roses and passed it proudly among her friends. Long after their attention had returned to the blackboard, she sat gazing at the picture.

''Winda is a smart child, and if she weren't working she would do well,'' says her school's guidance counselor, Aurora Sison. ''The child looks frail and pale, and she says she is getting weaker. Sometimes she falls asleep at her desk and I tell them, 'Let her sleep. She needs the rest.' ''

Both schools have invited Sepa to discuss her daughters, but the mother, who has even less schooling than they do, has been too shy to visit.

Winda is the first to rise, still wearing the crumpled clothes in which she worked and then camped out last night. She looks at the baby, rocks its hammock for a moment, then picks up a cracker lying on the floor, asking, ''Is this for me?'' She wanders out to wash and to watch a mah-jongg game.

Sepa talks quietly as she begins attaching tiny ribbons to the roses and wrapping them in pairs in clear cellophane. She may once have been as lively and good-humored as her daughters, but Sepa now seems beaten down by life. Her most animated expression is a slight lifting of her eyebrows and eyelids.

Both she and Rudy worked as children - he in the fields in their home province of Samar, on a distant island; she, from the age of 10, as a maid when her family came to Manila to seek a better life. ''People envy us because they know that life in Manila is good,'' Sepa says. ''If you stay in the province, you will have to look for food. You are more hungry in the province. You cannot find even a 25 centavo coin.''

Like many poor and uneducated parents around the world, Sepa seems to have little concept of the value of schooling, setting her sights on the short-term gains of her children's labor. It is an understandable shortsightedness among people who are constantly hungry. The girls' sacrifice means regular meals for their brother and sisters and contributes to the support of the Rascanos' extended family.

WINDA AND Muyeth first went to work selling salted watermelon seeds two years ago after their father was arrested for stabbing to death a family friend who had tried to calm him down during a drunken argument. The girls have been selling roses for the past year, and their mother is proud of them.

''If I gave birth in the province, maybe my children would not know how to work,'' Sepa says. ''Here, they are learning the ins and outs of life. The are learning how to take care of themselves. They are learning how to sell roses. With me, I had to go to work as a maid because I didn't know any kind of work. I would have been more happy selling roses.'' She says she has tried selling flowers but cannot earn as much money at it as her children. She also found that the work gave her a backache. ''Maybe she could earn as much as they do, but not every day,'' her husband says.

Sepa says her daughters only complain about their work on Sundays, asking why they cannot take the day off like other children. And they have both asked for new shoes, but Sepa has told them she cannot afford them.

The girls seem torn between their feelings of responsibility, the excitement of the bright lights of the street, and a desperation to be as healthy, happy and free as the children they see at school.

Sitting on a curbstone outside the bars late one night, after the rare treat of a visit to a fairground, they listen silently as I tell them of Sepa's pride in their ability to support the family. Then Muyeth says, ''But what about me?'' and begins to cry.

Sepa pays about 150 pesos for three dozen roses along with wire, ribbons and cellophane, plus 8 pesos a day for transportation and up to 40 pesos each time she enters the the jail and the cell block. If the girls sell all the flowers at 20 pesos a pair, which they rarely do, and if they do not bargain them away to get their work done more quickly, the family can clear 180 pesos a day, or about $9. It is a large sum for poor people in the Philippines.

The flowers are almost ready now, and Rudy calls in through the barred window of the cell, where he holds a whispered conversation with his wife. She hands him something from a coin purse, and soon it is evident that he is getting drunk with his friends near the shuttlecock table. ''So many problems, you know,'' he says, waggling one foot as he leans back, shirtless in the sunshine. He has a comical look in his tattered straw hat, black-and-white striped trousers and, for unexplained reasons, a pair of glasses without lenses.

''So many problems. If I drink, I can fall asleep and forget everything. Of course, when I wake up I am still here and the problems are still here.''

Her daughter sits up and stares for a few minutes at the wall, her arms folded. Then she looks at the baby, stuffs a bottle into its mouth and walks out without a word to wash in the jail's communal bathroom.

''Sometimes my friends say, 'Why don't you leave this guy. He'll be in prison for the rest of his life and he'll never be able to support you,' '' Sepa says. ''But it's hard to look for another guy. They all know that my children are earning good money with the flowers, and I'm afraid they might want me for my money.''

Also, she says, ''I pity Rudy. If I were not here, he would have no money and he would have to wash his clothes and clean the toilets like the other prisoners. If he has money, he can just relax.''

Rudy made a one-time payment of 600 pesos for his private cell, which is hung with clotheslines and decorated with a sign reading, ''Bless our home.'' He pays another prisoner to wash his clothes and prepare meals for him on a hot plate in a tiny private kitchen alcove. This afternoon the girls will share his breakfast of rice and grilled chicken necks before they go to work.

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Sepa's mother, who lives in a crowded squatter settlement, also asks for money from her affluent daughter, and when the children go to visit her she exacts a 10-peso fee for watching baby Jennifer.

When the girls have been earning well, Rudy can supplement their income by money-lending within the jail, and these days he enjoys the luxury of an electric fan, collateral from a debtor. But when the money has been spent, the Rascanos themselves go into debt. The girls say they suspect that their earnings, and sometimes the meals that are prepared for them at the jail, go directly to their father's creditors.

Now that they are at last up and washed, the girls' good humor sparkles in the prison yard. Wearing matching yellow plastic hair bands, they take 4-year-old Roderick and 2-year-old Michelle to bathe, with detours to the television set and the coin-toss game. Then the children run, bouncing a ball, to where their father sits in the sunshine, gathering around him to clutch at his knee or pat his bare back.

The men who lounge with Rudy, members of the social class into which the girls are being raised, have the raffish look of pirates, missing teeth and with earrings in their ears. Some carry the scars of knife wounds on their bellies or across their throats, and most bear elaborate gang tattoos running up their legs or along their backs or in lacy patterns around their nipples.

Joseph Smith, toothless at the age of 25, is the abandoned son of an American serviceman who learned to support himself as a pickpocket at the age of 9. He appears to have been forgotten by prison authorities and has waited here for seven years to enter a drug rehabilitation program.

''You must understand me. I had no choice. Nobody wants to die, and this was how I could live, even if I may not like it,'' he says. ''I became a very good pickpocket.''

Thieves, thugs and pickpockets, known as snatchers, are also part of the world the girls inhabit on the street where they work, along with prostitutes, transvestites and touts. Gangs of young addicts who sniff solvent from wadded rags sometimes taunt or make lewd gestures at Winda and Muyeth.

As the girls grow older, the foreign men who prowl the area for children have begun to approach them, and Winda was once mistakenly caught up in a police sweep of child prostitutes.

More kind to them are the beautiful hostesses in the bars, with their perfume and stylish clothes, who sometimes offer them the embraces they lack at home and help them sell roses to their customers.

Winda is particularly taken with these young women, and when she arrives on the street tonight she stops first to have her hair combed by a cigarette vendor who is a friend of her mother's. Then, sipping mango juice with her mother and sister at Rol's open-air restaurant, she wiggles her back and her elbows in time to the music that fills the air.

Borrowing a pen and a piece of paper, Muyeth laboriously writes out the multiplication tables she has learned at school and then prepares some simple problems in arithmetic for Winda. ''If I didn't teach her addition and subtraction, she wouldn't know anything,'' Muyeth says.

There seems to be little sense of upward mobility among Sepa and her friends, their energies focused on day-to-day survival. When there is an unexpected surplus, Sepa might spend it on a new wallet or a manicure, like any woman with a small business.

Pressed to think about her future, Muyeth looks up from her arithmetic and says, ''I'd like to be a cashier because I love playing with those adding machines. The only trouble is, I'm weak in math. If you know how to use the adding machine, will the answer come out right?''

But Muyeth has been set to thinking, and now she asks, ''Which is better, the Philippines or America? Where can I go where there are no snatchers or killers?''

She seems surprised to hear that there are snatchers and killers in America, too. When I suggest that education could offer the chance of a different life, Muyeth says nothing, simply lifting her eyebrows and eyelids in her mother's gesture.

She says the snatchers and the solvent sniffers give her less trouble now, and the children in school have stopped teasing her, because she has learned to be tough.

''Before, I used to cry, but my mother told me to fight back, so I throw stones (Continued on Page 67) at them,'' she says. ''Nobody teases me any more. Sometimes I am the one teasing them.''

There are times when the two sisters flare up at each other in a dispute that lasts no more than a second, ''like cats and dogs,'' as Muyeth describes it.

Sepa says this toughness can be embarrassing when she takes the girls to visit her relatives. ''I don't like it because they are still talking the way they do on the street or in jail,'' she says.

SEPA'S RELATIVES ARE one of a thousand families who lost their homes in a five-hour fire that swept through their flimsy shanties in Pandacan last April. The shacks have been rebuilt out of charred tin siding and plywood, and especially after a rain shower a faint smell of ashes still hangs in the air.

The families here are crowded almost as closely as in the cell blocks of the city jail. On one recent visit, Sepa took her children to spend the night with her mother, and 10 people slept side by side on the plywood floor in a space about the size of a king-size bed.

One of these was Sepa's youngest brother, Gil, who, as a second-year architecture student, bears the hopes of the family. On this night, feverish with chicken pox, he was bundled from head to foot in a green blanket beside the other sleepers. ''We have found that when you send someone with chicken pox to the hospital he usually dies,'' said a sister, Amy. ''The best thing is just to eat eggs and wait for the sickness to come out.''

The only trouble, Amy said, is that sometimes the sickness seems to spread to other people. For days afterward, Winda and Muyeth checked themselves for spots, finding unexpected itches here and there on their bodies.

Sepa and her daughters say they sometimes wish for a shanty of their own in Pandacan, but there is little evidence that they could manage their own home or avoid the feuds over funds and living space that have split the family.

And by the standards of the Pandacan slum-dwellers, Sepa is doing too well with her flower business to want to give it up. Even if Rudy were somehow released from jail and found a job of his own, she says, Muyeth and Winda would continue to work.

IT IS ONE OF MUYETH'S RARE days at school, and a guidance counselor, Beatrice Rivera, is asking the children if they have any problems. Some complain of trouble studying because their neighbors play loud music. Then Muyeth raises her hand and says, ''My problem is that my father is in jail.'' She is too embarrassed to say in front of her classmates why he is in jail, or that she lives there too, or that she sells flowers in the bars at night.

Later, all the fourth-grade girls gather in the school's courtyard to practice the next day's mass induction into the Girl Scouts. Muyeth sits alone under a tree, too poor to afford a Girl Scout uniform and too often absent from school to have learned the march steps the others are performing.

But, watching from the sidelines, she reads with enthusiasm from a lined notebook in which she has copied out the Scouting pledge and songs.

''I wish I could join the Girl Scouts and wear a uniform, but my mother says it costs too much money,'' she says, twisting her yellow hair band as she speaks. ''My father says it will keep me up too late and be bad for my health. But I think the real reason is that I have to work.''

The practice ceremony is over and it is growing dark as the little girl in the maroon school skirt and white blouse returns to her home at the city jail. She reaches up from the muddy courtyard to pass her school bag through the barred window of her father's cell.

The dirty whitewashed cell block is locked for the night, and seems to throb with the compressed energy of the men who are packed inside. Rudy is drunk tonight, someone tells Muyeth, and she decides not to go inside before she leaves for work.

Soon Winda also arrives from school and joins her sister on the lighted stoop near the cell block's barred doorway, to wait for their mother to come out.

Rudy peers out at one point and then disappears. Four-year-old Roderick hooks his fingers through the doorway and Muyeth says, ''A kiss,'' and they kiss through the bars.

Winda pulls a tiny mirror from her pocket and begins to apply gel to her hair. The sisters argue briefly when she is slow to share the gel with Muyeth.

Then someone pays a trusty to unlock the barred door and Sepa emerges with the roses and with a change of clothing for her daughters. The cell block closes behind her. Taking giant steps to avoid the muddy patches, the two girls head off with their mother for work, the cellophane that wraps their flowers shining in the dim light of the courtyard.

Much later that night, as she tells it the next day, Muyeth has a wonderful dream.

''I dreamed I was at the Girl Scout ceremony, and I was running fast and there were flags flying, yellow and green ones,'' she says. ''My mother was sitting under a tree and smiling at me and I felt so happy. I was wearing a Girl Scout uniform.''

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A version of this article appears in print on April 2, 1989, on Page 6006044 of the National edition with the headline: AN ASIAN TALE: YOUNG GIRLS, RED ROSES. Today's Paper|Subscribe